Off the Wall

(Nogales, Mexico. 2016)

The act of building a wall along the US border with Mexico is immoral. It goes against every instinct I have and religious text I have read. It's construction would be done without compassion, and it would serve as a compassionless non-solution for a problem constructed without compassion in mind.

That being said, I am not a moral or ethical thought leader. I don't think I would want to be - it sounds stressful as hell. But I feel obligated to say my piece on this subject, and to do that I have to employ practical and pragmatic reasons rather than moral.

More than it is without compassion, the wall is dumb. It is an expensive and impotent solution for an expensive and impotent administration, solving the wrong problems in the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong money.

“Some have suggested a barrier is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside. The only thing that is immoral is that politicians do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized.” - Pres. Trump* in a White House address.

The quote above misguided, because it's based on a misguided vision of the problems at the border and the solutions available.

I prefer to look to the people who would be affected the most by a border wall: Most people who live at the border agree that the wall shouldn't be expanded. It would require waving over 50 regulations including clean air and water (as it did in 2006) but more importantly it would require taking many ranchers' lands through eminent domain, something I consider and I think any freedom-loving American should consider immoral, unethical, and un-fucking-American. The secure fence act from 2006 already built a barrier where was needed most, and now illegal human migration is mostly by visa overstay and through airports, and most illegal import of drugs, weapons is through ports of entry. Increasing border security spending is fine - just not for a wall.

If people actually want to keep Americans safe they should support the proposal of Rep. Hurd of Texas, the only Republican to hold a district at the border. He proposed increasing spending for fiber optic cables and sensors along the border to be able to better detect illegal crossings. I consider this a humanitarian solution because when I went to the border to study it in 2016, 1 person per day died trying to cross into the US, many of them children. By being able to better detect illegal crossings, we can make the catch and release program (which made Obama the president who deported the most undocumented immigrants) a more effective solution, rather than spending 5 billion USD on a wall which will require more like 30 billion USD to build.

No matter what your goal is - fewer migrants, fewer illicit drugs, development of our border communities, fewer migrants dying trying to get into the US - a fiber optic cable is the viable, pragmatic, and attainable solution.

To quote Rep Hurd: “A wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security.”

I recommend you look Rep. Hurd up and check out his, again, Republican opinion on the issue. He has stressed that illicit drug trade happens on our northern border at a higher rate than at the southern, so why aren't we talking about a wall up there?

I think we all know why. I also want to say: I don't agree that being tough on immigration is the best way to show we "love those on the inside." The wealthy build walls and fences to defend from thieves and murderers. Undocumented migrants, statistically, are neither. Undocumented migrants who come to the US to do low skill jobs for $6 a day aren't stealing anything of mine, nor anything that Americans want, and they don't have access to our welfare policies as some like to claim. I just don't see what it is they're stealing.

To take well paying jobs requires a visa and a corporate sponsor, something very difficult to get. Either way - employment is not zero-sum. Immigrants aren't just workers, they're consumers.

But for the sake of stopping illicit drug and weapons trade, if the goal is increased border security, the solution is not a wall on the southern border, and it hasn't been for years. We all know that the Wall is the antithesis of the multicultural melting pot/salad bowl America some of us dream of. But in this case it is also the opposite of economic conservatism in the form of cost-effective policies AND freedom in the form of protection of private property. How any so-called conservative can advocate for it is beyond me. How any member of the so-called Freedom Caucus can vote for it is beyond me.

I can say diversity makes America beautiful until the hell freezes over, just like people can be xenophobic until the cows come home. The fact of the matter is that the return on investment of energy trying to stop xenophobia feels lower and lower with each conversation.

What I can't understand is the cognitive dissonance necessary to support a policy so painfully antithetical to the purpose of government: to solve the problems of the people, using the money of the people, in the most effective way.

Our problems are healthcare, they're jobs, they're debt, they're tuition costs, they're crumbling public education and infrastructure, they're gun violence, they're opioids, they're police brutality. Throw in every issue you want: the War on Christmas, gay frogs, people speaking spanish at the supermarket, the deep state, crisis actors, ISIL, and alQaeda, but a barrier along our southern border does not and will not solve a single one of these problems.

If you agree, please call or tweet your congresspeople to suggest funding for fiber optic cables and other security measures as a potential solution to end the shut-down, and to ask them to support the Democratic proposal for 5.7 billion USD in border security funding for anything but a barrier.

We need to better secure our ports of entry, and we need to end the humanitarian crisis at the border. The option on the table is the worst in the book.

#TheAmericas #Politics #opinion